Tag: Discipline

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Lord's Day Liturgy

Discipline or Destruction

Jesus, as the Amen, told the Church of the Lukewarm that the ones He loves, He reproves and disciplines (Revelation 3:19). In Hebrews 12 we learn not only about laying aside sin that slows down our run (verse 1), but also about God’s discipline. 

He disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12:10-11)

As sons, when we are subject to the “Father of spirits” we live (Hebrews 12:9). 

In Romans 6 we’ll be reminded that Christians are sons and slaves. God is our Father and our Master. He is righteous, He frees us to be righteous, He instructs and strengthens and disciplines us that we might see the fruit of righteousness. 

There are two kinds of pain: the pain of discipline or the pain of destruction. According to the word of the Lord, the pain of discipline leads to peace. The pain of destruction leads to more pain. 

My son, do not despise the LORD’S discipline  
or be weary of his reproof,
for the LORD reproves him whom he loves,
as a father the son in whom he delights.
(Proverbs 3:11–12 ESV, quoted in Hebrews 12:5-6)

Be wise, receive His corrections that bring about the blessings of obedience. 

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Lord's Day Liturgy

Not a Hands Off God

Discipline hurts. Discipline is not entirely the same as punishment, though the pain part may overlap. God says in the book of Hebrews that discipline stings, at least in the moment (Hebrews 12:11). But He also says that the sting is not the point. Punishment aims at pain. Discipline aims at the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

Throughout the Bible God reveals that His discipline is like that of a father (as in Proverbs 3:11-12). The starting assumption is that to discipline like a father means to discipline in love. A father knows what is right, he is honest when his son doesn’t do what is right, and he doesn’t wait around for everything to just work itself out. A loving father speaks up, decides consequences, provides training, and some of that may be painful.

What are the disciplined supposed to learn? As mentioned, they are supposed to learn what is right, and that doing right has a different pain than not doing right. God’s discipline leads to holiness, and that is good (Hebrews 12:10).

But isn’t it also true that discipline teaches a son that he is loved? Love cares about what is right and about the other person and about the other person learning to love what is right. Love isn’t hands off. Love trains to transform a son to grow up so that he can discipline his son in love. Discipline turns sons into kings (see Revelation 3:21).

Our Father has a fully stocked discipline arsenal. When He sees His children disobey, with discontented or tepid souls, He has limitless ways to get our attention. Is He disciplining you? It is because He loves you.

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The End of Many Books

Relentless

by Tim Grover

I grew up watching Michael Jordan, and this was an interesting perspective from his first trainer. This is not a book about Christlike greatness. It’s not a book about how to have friends or care about anyone other than yourself. At the same time I found some of the reminders timely and a spur to confidence.

3 of 5 stars

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Lord's Day Liturgy

Discipline of a Different Style

When a man refuses to repent from his sin the church disciplines him which includes no longer allowing him to participate in communion. When a man is repenting from his sin the church provides discipline of a different style which includes providing weekly opportunity to participate in communion. There is discipline in not communing, there is discipline in communing.

Discipline almost always has the idea of negative feedback, equated to punishment and involving pain of some kind. But discipline and disciple are related terms, and both are rooted in the Latin word discipulus which means “learner” at the most basic level. A disciplined person is a person who is learning, not just suffering something unpleasant.

There is discipline for disciples in coming to the Lord’s Table week by week. The way we approach it, it is not unpleasant, but it is not easy either. There is necessary work to get ready for it and to partake in it. What do disciples learn here at Supper?

We learn, or are regularly remembering what we’ve learned, that there is no forgiveness without the shedding of blood. We learn that salvation is not by any of our works. We learn that atonement is substitutionary. We learn that God fulfills His promises. We learn that faith gets fed. We learn that God desires fellowship with us. We learn that we are not alone. We learn that we are always proclaiming something, and that we are privileged to proclaim in eating and drinking the good news of Jesus’ death. We learn that today is not the end, but we must eat and drink “until He comes.” We learn that thankfulness is the necessary tone, and the Table trains us get in tune.

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Lord's Day Liturgy

Left Without Discipline

We are still in a series of exhortations to confession focused on being blessed. Recognizing our blessings from God and giving Him thanks for those blessings is a part of our evangelistic strategy. This is not a prosperity gospel, though prosperity can be a blessing. There are other blessings that are harder to recognize, so we want to see them and boast in the Lord about them.

The last couple blesseds have been from the Beatitudes, and there are more worth covering from that Sermon, but for now let’s consider that one of our heavenly Father’s great blessings to His children is discipline.

Blessed is the man whom you discipline, O LORD,
And who you teach out of your law. (Psalm 94:12)

The version we sing at our church is, “blessed the man whom You chastise, Lord, whom You teach to know Your way” (“God of Vengeance, O Jehovah”). Discipline is training, often that corrects disobedience. Discipline can include rebuke or pain that turns us away from sin and back to holiness.

The author of Hebrews says a lot about discipline without using the word blessed, but it certainly applies. He even quotes Proverbs 3:11-12 which has some overlap with Psalm 94:12.

How is discipline a blessing?

Discipline means that we are not abandoned, but loved. God’s discipline is a father’s love for a son, not a judge’s punishment of a criminal. Worse than that, perhaps, is being allowed to have whatever we want, left to sit and stew in soul destroying sin. Discipline displays our Father’s wise affection applied to us. “The Lord disciplines the one he loves” (Hebrews 12:6). And, “if you are left without discipline…then you are illegitimate children and not sons” (Hebrews 12:8).

Discipline also means that we are not finished, but still being shaped. The Father wants us to “share His holiness” (Hebrews 12:10). That would be preposterous if God Himself hadn’t said it. Discipline is “for our good,” it “yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11).

So don’t be weary when He corrects you (Hebrews 12:5). Don’t treat His discipline like an unwanted intervention. Discipline is blessing, and we ought to receive discipline in such a way that makes others jealous to have it.

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Lord's Day Liturgy

The Goodness of God’s Discipline

None of us have endured the sort of hostility that Christ endured, not even one. He is an example par excellence that we “may not grow weary or fainthearted” (Hebrews 12:3). Keep running the race. He did, so we should.

Hostility and difficulty prove the grace we’ve received; joyful responses are not natural but supernatural. Struggles also train us to grow up in Christ. The author of Hebrews has a lot to say about this training and, in particular, about the goodness of God’s discipline.

God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? (Hebrews 12:7)

A son left to his own, says Solomon, is hated (Proverbs 13:24). A loved son is a corrected son.

We have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not must more be subject to the Father of Spirits and live? (Hebrews 12:9)

God the Father knows best. Really. He knows where we need to be in life and how to help us get there.

He disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. (Hebrews 12:10)

He’s imparting His own nature, sharing it with us.

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12:11)

God does not deny that there are painful parts. Sometimes learning and growing hurts. But He does tells why He’s doing it.

He loves us as His children. He sent His Son to die for us. Because Jesus died for us, He will correct us and consecrate us for His family. For Christians, discipline is a feature, not a bug.

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Lord's Day Liturgy

We’ve Got a Long Way to Go

I have never met a runner convinced that he would race faster if only he could carry a heavier bag. Runners run better by dropping weight, not by picking it up, just as a Trans Am loaded down with a year’s worth of college accumulation doesn’t get better gas mileage. Switching illustration fields, rose bushes never trimmed never bloom as much as they could.

Often we ignore these realities in our souls. We stubbornly cling to beloved burdens and sin that makes running that much harder.

We pile on worldly mindsets and wonder why we can’t get up to spiritual speed. We defend every branch of interest we have, even the dead ends and judge the emptiness of our branches as a sign that spring just hasn’t arrived.

God does not accept or make excuses for our fruitlessness. He calls us to “lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely” so that we can “run with endurance the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1). He calls us “put off [our] old self, which belongs to [our] former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires” (Ephesians 4:22). And “every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (John 15:2).

“For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11). If God didn’t love us, then He would let us hold on to things that keep us from true life and more fruit. Let us not despise His correction but receive it for our good as sons.

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Lord's Day Liturgy

Stuck in the Driveway

We should take the Lord’s Table seriously because the Lord Himself does. He “fences” His Table, He protects it from abuse, not always at the table itself, but afterward, which does cause much effect. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 11:

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. … Anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. (1 Corinthians 11:27, 29–30, ESV)

Some sins, here a disrespect of communion, do lead to suffering, sickness, and “sleep” in a casket. “Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup” (verse 28). Check the system before you take off so the wheels don’t fall off down the road.

But this exhortation by Paul is no scare tactic. It’s not meant to make us panic, to consume us with pre-trip checklists so that we never get out of the driveway. The exhortation protects us from failure to take our sin and His sacrifice seriously. When we do that, we can enjoy the meal.

His sacrifice was for sin, on behalf of sinners. The bread and the cup represent His body and blood given for sake of our forgiveness and our cleansing. By His wounds we are healed. We don’t heal ourselves before we come to this table. Only Christ can make anyone well and that’s why we exult in Him, not in our examination.

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Lord's Day Liturgy

Holding Out the Sharpie

The disciples demonstrated their ignorance when they assumed an invariable connection between the man born blind and a specific sin in John 9. Not all human pain can be interpreted as punishment for a particular sin. We, like the first disciples, need to think before we speak so knowingly about the causes of someone else’s effects.

Does that mean that no suffering can be traced to a specific sin? Obviously not. If a sixteen year old asked me to sign the cast over his broken arm that he got in the car wreck following the police chase after he robbed Starbucks, and he says that he just doesn’t know God’s purposes in his pain, the one making wrong assumptions is the one holding out the Sharpie.

But is that the type of situation when we can draw a connection between sin and suffering? Hebrews 12 tells us that God disciplines those that He loves. He disciplines His children, and when? When they sin. He perfects His kids with many means, including suffering, just as He did with His Son (Hebrews 2:10), and His Son never sinned. There are times for us when the pain means Stop it. Some of His children may need deeper wounds to get the message.

How will you know if a particular pain is discipline for your sin or if the pain is initiated by God to display His glory? We do not have a foolproof test, but there is one thing that is very helpful: a clear conscience.

Granted, a clear conscience could be wrong because it is misinformed or deceived. A clear conscience goes a long way, not all the way. It’s helpful, not inerrant. Nevertheless, if you are carrying sin around in your heart, refusing to confess it, kill it, and make it right with your victim, then you will have a hard time rationalizing away your troubles to something other than the Father’s training.